Before coming to Voice Movement Therapy (VMT), I first trained to be a singer. After finishing my studies, I worked with various bands and, having played piano since I was 10 years old, I also accompanied myself doing solo gigs in various venues, bars and restaurants.

A few years after playing the same circuit, I became tired of this lifestyle. 

A constant underlying belief that my life as an artist should be more successful made me feel uneasy and restless. It was like thinking that I should be someone else — not really knowing what “someone else” actually means, what she looks like, does or who she is…the perfect blurry tactic of the mind to feel unworthy and not be present.

Then a profound moment of career change occurred, which I remember clearly: 

I was sitting on the tube in London and suddenly had a very emotional and intensely vivid image of teaching someone to sing. My heart opened. I felt a surge of joy running through me, an instant knowing that I can do this, embedded in a delicious wish to give, and a sense of true fulfillment — all attributes that, in hindsight, I would summarize into one phrase: Being of Service.

I was so excited to try this, and so it didn’t take long for my first singing student to appear at my doorstep. 

Having worked with various singing teachers, I first drew on my memories of how they taught.

After a few years of teaching myself, I began to find a way of structuring lessons that worked for me, mostly keeping the classic shape: first encouraging the breath to flow, followed by scales and vocal exercises to train and strengthen the physiological instrument, all eventually leading into singing a song. 

There’s a reason why these steps remained throughout the ages and why so many people use this format — it works really well.

Depending on the student’s ability, I was able to vary the exercises and the level of song difficulty, slowly increasing the challenges and therefore helping to strengthen the vocal and musical muscles of the singer. 

I trained in Jazz/Pop music, so the invitation to my students to look for and welcome their emotional creative expression was naturally part of my work. Yet there was room for expansion…

By that time I was already extensively working therapeutically on my own life.  The deep and holistic relationship between our body, our history, our current life situation, our soul and spirit, and our vocal expression had begun to dawn on me.

This was when I found Voice Movement Therapy. 

VMT opened refreshing and new, long longed-for doorways into forms of vocal exploration that enabled many paradigms of previously discouraging patterns to shift.

First, the overall atmosphere around vocal expression within VMT is one of utter acceptance (unless it’s damaging to the singer or the practitioner, of course). There is no aspect of our vocal expression that is ever rejected or seen as not good enough; in fact, the aim of this work is to retrieve all colors and shades of the vocal sounds we are capable of, may they generally be perceived as beautiful, ugly, or somewhere in between. 

Just this in itself is such good news to the voice, and it breathes a huge sigh of relief.

What a powerful metaphor for our lives as human beings! Isn’t that what we all long for: to be accepted and, yes, loved for exactly who we are? So when we learn to rediscover and make friends with all aspects of our voice, magic begins to happen and well-being begins to spill over and spread into our lives. 

The reason for this, I believe, is due to the fact that we all so deeply and instinctively identify with our voices — therefore, accepting our voice means accepting ourselves.

Secondly, VMT provides an amazing key to re-discover and learn to track our own emotional inner landscape. From my point of view, our singing voice naturally lives mainly in our emotional body, compared to our speaking voice which stays more in the cognitive-based realms. (The fact is  — and it’s scientifically proven — that the two centers for singing and speaking are located in separate areas of the brain.)

So as soon as we start to sing, we contact our true emotional Self. Perhaps that’s why singing is so scary for some, yet glorious to others: we start to feel again.

VMT has created a wonderful fluid system that leads to an extensive understanding of emotional states, expressed through various vocal components and linked with powerful archetypes. This combination flourishes in what we call a VMT Journey — a spontaneous journey through movement and vocal sounding that helps us to feel, know and understand ourselves better, moment by moment. This framework of informative structures and creative playgrounds of exploration, provides profound tools for consciously working with and on our authentic vocal expression.

Other aspects of VMT (just to mention a few) — like using spontaneous song weaving, and working with sub-personalities — give access to changing the shape of the internal landscapes of our past, thereby harnessing and experiencing the amazing transformational capacity of the power of singing, song and art.

Having tasted this deepening of understanding of how our voice can give us incredible information about ourselves and having experienced the therapeutic value of working consciously with it, I continued to integrate this information, first within myself and eventually by working with other people.

After years of having had my voicework steeped in VMT, I eventually returned back to my original singing lesson format. The reason for this is that this format provides a really strong structure that holds me as well as my students really well — especially those who are not ready to jump right into the deep end yet.

Most students or clients come because they want to sing songs, yet are already on a path of self discovery and instinctively feel that here, in working with their voice, is a space in which they can find out more about themselves.

So while I’m outwardly back in the format of a singing teacher, I am not the same. I have explored — and continue to explore — the emotional underbelly of vocal expression thanks to the gifts of VMT. Energetically I’m more finely in tune and hold a much greater understanding of the life underneath the voice.

I think that every singer and singing teacher knows that there are huge depths that we touch when we or our students sing, yet not too many dare to or know how to guide people through these waters.

It’s not black-and-white and there are many overlapping areas, but in general: the singing lesson aspect provides me with playful, light and fun structures like working with exercises, techniques, harmonies, existing songs, and music in general; the VMT aspect informs me about the underlying issues, helps me gain access to finding authentic and creative self expression, and offers tools in difficult situations when things come up and transformation is needed.

So for me, working within a singing lesson format while having access to VMT’s embodied knowledge, provides a wonderful balancing and dancing act.

In this way, I am hoping to be able to accompany people in bringing themselves fully to voicework and finding a healthier, happier and, above all, more conscious relationship to their voice and to themselves.